2.5 – Imperiatrix

As violence erupts in the Gallifreyan Capitol, Romana must make a dangerous bargain to avoid a civil war.

1 Comment

Styre
on May 9, 2016 at 12:58 AM

GALLIFREY: IMPERIATRIX

A recent thread on Gallifrey Base got me thinking about why I haven’t yet felt satisifed with Big Finish’s Gallifrey miniseries. As part of a debate about the presentation of Gallifrey and the Time Lords throughout Doctor Who history, a poster outlined the morally-questionable things we’ve seen from them. They’ve planned to execute the Doctor on multiple occasions to cover up other crimes. They’ve imprisoned some of their greatest leaders and scientists. There are strong hints of an imperialist, despotic past. They gladly massacre the population of Earth to cover up some stolen secrets. Ancient pieces of Time Lord technology are the subject of myths. And they’re always cast in opposition to the Doctor, with his irreverent, human-like behavior casting the Time Lords into sharp relief. Take the Doctor out of the series, though, and we lose our point of reference. Yes, Romana is there, but despite her urges toward reform, she’s the Lord President, the embodiment of the establishment. Leela is the closest thing we have to an outsider, but even she’s been on Gallifrey for decades without aging.

And so we come to Stewart Sheargold’s “Imperiatrix,” the final story of the second Gallifrey season, and we find ourselves, in many ways, exactly where we started. Yes, it’s impressive to finally have a play in which things happen — tensions come to a head, there are bombings, and regular characters meet tragic ends — but throughout I kept asking myself why I was supposed to find any of this interesting. Certainly Gallifrey itself isn’t — the irony about the drama revolving around Romana’s reforms is that those reforms would stop Time Lord society being fascinating. Seriously, we’ve spent nine stories in the heart of one of the oldest, most powerful civilizations in the universe, one which commands authority over time itself, and I can’t remember a single moment in which I felt at all impressed. Yes, there has been temporal intrigue, but at its core the Gallifrey series is about political machinations — and this strikes me as wasted potential. “Imperiatrix” ends on a gripping cliffhanger, to be sure, but the possible consequences exist only in the abstract.

I hate to take these feelings out on Sheargold’s story, since it’s easily the best script yet in the series and he’s an author whose work I’ve generally enjoy, but as the “end credits” rolled, I found myself thinking “okay, so what?” — and that’s a feeling I cannot abide.